ePortfolios and Social Software

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ePortfolios and Social Software

• Margaret Price and Darren Cambridge

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Recommendation Reflect on assumptions about what
Net Gen students can do or wish to do.

• The first time I came on to Facebook, it
  seemed a benefit to Americans, just because it
  seemed like a way to connect to high school
  friends and stuff. But being from Trinidad I
  wasnt a part of that culture, so I didnt have
  anybody to connect to. So thats why I came off.
  And then I came back on because if you walk into
  a computer lab, everybodys checking their
  Facebook page. So I was like what is all the
  fuss? So I went back on, and I did talk to
  friends or whatever. But I think these places,
  that whole idea of uniting is very superficial in
  terms of, if I really wanted to keep in touch
  with you, I would.
• Colette Hosten

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Recommendation Reflect on assumptions about what
Net Gen students can do or wish to do.

• MySpace, I tried that, but the whole building
  the page thing was just too much work. I felt
  like I didnt know how, like the pages Ive seen,
  it seems so technical. And I dont know who
  these everyday people are who can do this, and
  for such superficial reasons, you know.
• Colette Hosten

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Recommendation Reflect on your own or others
responses to names of social software.

• Veta As I think about their final eFolios, an
  issue for a couple of them was that they had a
  real kind of MySpace kind of feel to them.
• Margaret That was an issue for them, or
• Veta For me in looking, in evaluating.
• Margaret What was the MySpaceness like?
• Veta That it seemed less contemplative and
  more, more cluttered. It seemed more about me
  than about my contemplative experience
  pictures of me and my friends, and this kind of
  thing, and All About Me and biography and stuff
  in comparison to some of the others, where
  theres a real sense of stillness and calm that
  was different than these.

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Opportunities
Purposes Identified by Students (Social
Software)
Purposes Identified by Faculty Administration
(Academic Projects)

• Constant stream of communication.
• Sharing with various audiences.
• Ability to incorporate a sense of self into the
  composition.

• Iterative process of feedback, reflection, and
  revision.
• Increased rhetorical awareness of audience.
• Sense of personal investment, engagement.

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Two Faces of Integrative Learning
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Contexts

• Emergent findings of campuses involved in the
  Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio
  Research
• Interest in Computers Writing community in both
  electronic portfolios and social software How do
  they connect, or not?
• Informal learning discussion on the blogs
• Integrative learning as a key theme in discourse
  of higher education reform

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Two Faces

• What kinds of selves do our digital portfolios
  models invite from students? (Yancey 2004)
• Two dimensions of integrative learning parallel
  two types of selves

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Networked and Symphonic Selves

• Network Self
• Creating intentional connections
• Symphonic Self
• Achieving integrity of the whole

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Distinctions

• Symphonic most consonant to the tradition of
  portfolio pedagogy in the United States
• Network most consonant to recent integrative
  learning discourse
• Cant be (and isnt) either/or
• Differ in values, activities, genre
  characteristics, technologies, and impacts

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Values

• Play, emergence, entrepreneurialism, flexibility,
  agility
• Analysis
• Liberalism
• Student engagement

• Integrity, commitment, intellectual engagement,
  balance
• Creativity
• Humanism
• Personal engagement

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Activities

• Folio thinking
• Ease, speed, low cost integration
• Embedded in day-to-day
• Connection
• Aggregation, association
• Collection
• Reflection-in-action, constructive reflection
• Revision
• Continual learning

• Matrix thinking
• Time, effort, high cost integration (author,
  context, and audience)
• Stepping out of daily work
• Articulation, reframing
• Synthesis, symphony
• Selections, projection
• Reflection-in-presentation
• Iteration
• Moments of mastery, accomplishment, celebration

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Genre Characteristics

• Space
• Openings
• Relationships as end, heuristic, invention
• Relationships between things
• Atomized, aggregated
• Collection, list, link, datum, snapshot

• Text, composition
• Boundaries
• Relationships as organization
• Relationships between relationships
• Holistic, integral, systemic
• Theory, story, interpretation, map

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Technologies

• Web 2.0 tools, social software, Identity 2.0
  providers, PLEs and other aggregators,
  MyLifeBits. ELGG
• Atom, RSS, FOAF, Flikr API, Open ID, etc.

• ePortfolio systems
• Concept mapping systems
• IMS ePortfolio, Topic Maps, RDF

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Impacts

• Low yield incremental and by accretion
• Greater connectedness and intentionality
• Learning in the network

• High yield occasional and intensive
• Synthesis, coherence, feeling of integrity
• Learning in the individual

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Living Both

• Bi-stable equilibrium
• Learning in layers